Tea and Sympathy

Like its Broadway predecessor, the new movie called Tea and Sympathy concerns a prep school housemaster and his wife and a student whose name is Tom Lee. Both tell of the suffering felt especially by these three when the boy is accused homosexuality. But the resemblance doesn't go too far. The people who adapted the play to the screen--including Robert Anderson, the playwright and now the script writer--have succeeded in making the prejudices which victimized the boy appear ridiculous. The result of their diligence is a movie that is limited by this intention. The film is uncomfortable to watch and its characters are often untrue.

Since it focuses more on predudices than people, the film's handling of the relations between the characters is often clumsy. The people are so explicit with each other, especially at the start, that their conversation sounds more like exposition: "Why isn't he a regular fella, Bill?" "He certainly isn't a chip off the old block, Herb." Tom Lee's reputation as an "off-horse, not a regular guy" is established at once--crudely, with dialogue that is blatantly expository. His schoolmates don't speak like human beings, not even like unkind human beings.

While it suffers from being more didactic than the play, the movie most conspicuously lacks the understatement which the play's single set for instance, made possible. The camera ranges after Tom as he goes to the beach, the golf course, the school pajama party, and even to the rooms of Ellie, the local prostitute. The difference is that the movie's director, Vincente Minelli, seems intent to extract every bit of emotion, or--as the ads suggest--"sensitivity" from events that were only spoken of in the play. The apparent eagerness of both the writer and the director to exploit the scenes of misunderstanding do most to make the movie so uncomfortable.

If the characters in the film are adept at trampling upon each other's feelings, they are not, for this reason, more human. The play was about people--as Anderson said, "It is a play about the loneliness of the individual." With the movie, however, the focus shifts from the loneliness of individuals to the prejudices of a group. The housemaster, as played--mostly in grunts--by Leif Erickson, does not come out as a person, he is rather a symbol of the exaggerated masculinity whose persecution Tom suffers. With the film's emphasis on the "problem" rather than the people, the schoolmaster's self-doubt--which, in the play, made him human and even sympathetic--is hardly apparent. Similarly, as Tom Lee, John Kerr cannot give his part the truth it had in the original. Though the adaptation adds to his role a suicide attempt and a pajama fight, he is somewhat wooden; and his awkwardnesses are not those of a boy since he seems, and is, much older than 18. Only Deborah Kerr, as Laura Reynolds, gives her role real depth, and suggests, as the others don't, the loneliness they all share.

Though the stars are the same and the playwright wrote the script himself, the movie has lost the play's subtlety and charm. Metrocolor, the wide screen, and a new ending don't add much to what is left of Tea and Sympathy.